The False Positive probability in spaced-based transit surveys

R. F. DÍAZ; F. BOUCHY; J. M. ALMENARA; A. SANTERNE; G. HÉBRARD; C. MOUTOU; M. DELEUIL

Marseille

Simposio; 2nd CoRoT Symposium; 2011

False positives plague surveys for transiting planets, the most common im- postors being usually eclipsing binary stars blended by a brighter star, either physically bound to the pair or aligned with our line of sight by chance. The Kepler mission employs the novel method of analysing the stellar flux centroid during transit events to drastically reduce the sky area in which the blended binary system could reside. Thus, the expected false positive probability (FPP) has been recently estimated to be under 10 %. In this talk we present the CoRoT FPP based on over 4 years of ground-based follow-up, and we discuss the first measurement of the Kepler FPP, obtained based on the first months of the SOPHIE follow-up of Kepler candidates.